Dear readers of European Societies,
It is my great pleasure to inform you that the ESA now chose and appointed, with effect from September, a new editor team for our flagship journal European Societies (ES). Michalis Lianos took over ES from Göran Therborn as Editor-in-chief since the first issue of volume 17 in 2015, so he is now in his sixth year of being responsible for the journal. As our statutes delimit the term of editors to five years, in autumn 2020, the Executive Committee of ESA published a call for expressions of interest in editing the journal and defined a deadline of end of December 2020. The call was distributed via our magazine The European Sociologist and via all Research Networks.
In the call, we underlined the basic characteristics of ES as covering all relevant aspects of sociological theory and empirical research; publishing research from every part of the planet on all aspects of social life either related to Europe or in a comparative perspective; welcoming all sociological methods and approaches in sociological theory; focusing on addressing the specific contribution of contemporary European society/societies to a global world, as well as on the serious socioeconomic and socio-political challenges that European societies face; and underlining that ES is strictly focused on high quality articles, and therefore prevents favouritism (e.g. editors, board members etc. cannot publish in the journal during their term; young researchers are welcome; ‘Matthew effects’ should be inhibited).
We also emphasized the explicit strategy of the ESA to lead its associational journals towards Open Access and underscored the great opportunity for the new editors to forge this process in strong cooperation with the Executive Committee of the ESA. This process of redefining the publication strategy shall be fine-tuned until the end of 2022 in close coordination with our publishing company Taylor & Francis.
Fortunately, we received three substantial bids of teams that presented elaborated proposals how to develop the journal. As our Executive Committee always focuses on transparency and democracy, the Publication Committee invited the current editor and the editors of our second journal, the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, to participate in the extended meetings that we had with the two most promising teams. Both teams consisted of highly experienced professionals of our discipline and integrated a wider range of specific knowledge and career position. Finally, first the Publication Committee and the current editors and then the Executive Committee as a whole, unanimously agreed to assign the team of Evelyn Ersanilli (University of Amsterdam), Alexi Gugushvili (University of Oslo), and Patrick Präg (CREST/ENSAE/IP Paris) as new editors. We are fully convinced that they will lead ES into a promising future. Michalis Lianos will hand over in September this year so that there is enough overlapping time for warming up.
This is a good first opportunity to express our deep thanks to our outgoing editor Michalis Lianos. Every sociologist knows the value of published articles. They are probably the most important communication media, the fuel for scientific knowledge and debate. But we all also know the very hard work that is to motivate possible submitters of papers, to find actually qualified and responsible reviewers, to invite authors to revive and improve their submitted pieces, to communicate with the technical assistants, the publisher, the Executive Committee and the ESA office team. For a journal like ES, this may amount to a full-time job but the ESA, like other associations, cannot afford to pay a salary. Michalis worked in an ideal way, always procuring high quality and impact of the journal, encouraging especially young scholars to engage with ES and always looking for specialized and accountable reviewers. ESA and all of us we owe much to Michalis. The same holds for our editorial assistant, Agnes Skamballis, who offers her services to the ESA for a modest fee. Without her assiduous work, ES could not attain the continuity and the quality appearance that it has. We also express our thankfulness to the associate editors during Michalis’s term. Finally, we wish to explicitly honour the selfless engagement of our reviewers.
Our journals reflect the capacities of generous joint efforts. We are fully convinced that the new team will continue with fresh ideas and new energy for the sake of this endeavour.